What’s My Risk Of Dying From COVID-19 vs Dying from the Vaccine?

[Updated 1-24-2022: please note, the original version of this article stated that the risk of dying from vaccination was 0.0020%, but the vaccination death rate has increased and the vaccination date rate is now 0.0022% according to the CDC]

[Updated 2-28-2022: According to the CDC, the vaccination death rate has now increased to 0.0023% ]

[Updated 9-28-2022: According to the CDC, the VAERS reported vaccination death rate continues to climb and has now reached to 0.0027%, so we’ve updated the calculations below and also added a peer reviewed medical paper suggesting greater risk for the non-elderly population ]

Trying to decide which is worse, your risk of dying from COVID-19 vs dying from the vaccine? We’ll attempt to break down the numbers and link to their sources.

Chance of COVID-19 Death

According to some popularly distributed numbers, there is a 0.05% chance of dying from COVID-19 for the global population. Though some experts don’t dispute that the math for this is accurate, they say it “ignores the different types of risks that individuals across the world face, including a person’s age, health status or how widespread COVID-19 is in their community.”

So let’s take some of those factors into consideration! We’ll break them out below in the “Other Factors” section, but before that let’s take a look at the vaccine risk.

Chance of COVID-19 Vaccine Death

Though the CDC calls the vaccines “safe”, the CDC also acknowledges are not risk free. Aside from the CDC reporting side effects such as Thrombosis, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, Anaphylaxis, Myocarditis and Pericarditis, they also report deaths from the COVID-19 vaccine.

According to the same CDC article, so far “VAERS received 16,516 reports of death (0.0027%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.” This currently puts the reported general risk of dying from vaccination at 0.0027% while the risk of dying from COVID-19 is reported at 0.0500%, which is higher, for the general population. More recent research suggests that the non-elderly population risk of dying from the MRNa vaccine could be even higher.

If we look at the population as a whole, current data suggests they have a better chance of surviving the vaccine, than their chances of getting and surviving COVID-19. For the average person, if we don’t take into account other factors, the vaccine could the “safer” option, despite its potential side effects.

Other Factors

What happens when we take into account other factors like adjusting for age or underlying health conditions and social distancing?

Age Risk

The CDC has a page just for showing the age relative risk. They show that the risk increases as you age. You can do this math yourself for your own age, but since that can vary a lot, for our example let’s just take the numbers from the general population for now, and assume you’re someone who has an average risk.

Underlying Condition Risk

What if we factor in underlying conditions? According to a CDC study 94.9% of people hospitalized had an underlying condition. If you don’t have an underlying condition then, that might significantly decrease your risks. According to the statistics in this study, the risk of someone being hospitalized who doesn’t have underlying conditions is only 5.1% of the general population. Keep in mind this is only for hospitalization, so risk of dying would be even lower than this, but let’s stick with higher number just to play our numbers on the safe side and assume there is more risk than the CDC study shows.

Without Underlying Conditions

Let’s look at the math then, as the chance of dying from COVID-19 is 0.05% so let’s take 5.1% of that.

0.05 x 0.051 = 0.00255

For someone who doesn’t have an underlying condition, their risk of dying from COVID-19 would then be 0.00255%. Or, even if we round that off to the same level resolution as the CDC numbers, that’s a 0.0026% risk of dying from COVID-19.

For a person without underlying health conditions, that puts their risk of dying from COVID-19 at 0.0026% which is very close to, and technically below the CDC claims someone’s risk is for dying from vaccination at 0.0027%.

With Social Distancing

Since we know that not all people practice social distancing and wear a mask, and that this has been shown to reduce rates of COVID-19 infection, we could account for this as well. Some of the latest figures say that only 18% of people are currently social distancing and previous to that only 36% were social distancing.

So what if you’re one of those people who does still social stance? What are your odds? According to a Commentary published in The Lancet by Professor Raina, there was a reduction in risk of 82% with one meter of physical distance between people in both health care and community settings. 

Reducing your risk with social distancing could then give someone with no underlying health conditions an even better odds of surviving COVID-19 than they would have of surviving the vaccine.

Some People Have Better Odds Not Taking the Vaccine

Please keep our health advice disclaimer in mind, but based on the numbers cited above, if we take the risk of someone who does not have underlying health conditions dying from COVID-19, and further mitigates that risk by social distancing their chance is reduced by 82%. Let’s do the math for that:

0.00255 x 0.18 = 0.000459

Based on the math above though, could mean that a healthy, social distancing person’s risk is 0.000459%. This could be slightly different depending on your order of operations, but either way it put’s it well below the 0.0023% that the CDC sites as the risk of death from the COVID-19 vaccine.

Let’s look at this in a table (with the numbers rounded off to the same decimal place so their easier to compare):

COVID-19 Related Risk Factors	Percent of Risk
Risk of death from COVID-19 for the general population:	0.0050%
Risk of death from the vaccine according to CDC:	0.0027%
Risk of death from COVID-19 if you have no underlying health conditions:	0.0026%
Risk of death from COVID-19 if with no underlying health conditions and also social distancing:	0.0005%

No Mandate Justification?

As can be seen above, for the average person, vaccination is the safer route. But based on the studies and math above, for some people (with no underlying health conditions and who social distance), the risk of dying from COVID-19 is less than the risk of dying from the vaccine. For those people, it seems to be more dangerous to take the vaccine, than it is to not take it.

So if some people can actually be safer without the vaccine, this seriously pulls into question the recent vaccine mandates from President Biden. If the vaccine represents the greater risk for some people, why should it be the governments decision to mandate people to risk their lives and be forced to take it or lose their job?

For some people, the mere fact that any person has died from the vaccine and to still have the CDC call it “safe” is highly troubling. If someone dies from it, is it really safe?

Another thing to bear in mind is that there are a number of other side effects (besides death) that are reported by the CDC, which could validate the claims of many people about their reported vaccine injury which have been censored by the media. Because of being silenced by the media, some of them decided go to a senator to get a public voice heard.

At the end of the day, we hope that each person is allowed to make their own informed decision about whether the vaccine is right for them given their own health factors.

Peer Reviewed Studies

A medically peer reviewed research paper from the Journal of Insulin Resistance now concludes that “real-world data reveals that in the non-elderly population, the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one death from Covid-19 runs into thousands and that re-analysis of randomized controlled trial data from the initial vaccine clinical trials suggests a greater risk of suffering a serious adverse event from the vaccine than to be hospitalized with Covid-19.“

Risk Calculator

If you have recently been asked to test, or have tested positive, and would like to see what your individual chances are, there is a risk calculator from Cleveland Clinic, which you can access at https://riskcalc.org/